scholarly journals International Norms and Domestic Structures

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Ryan Lebans ◽  
Lauren Peirce ◽  
Kevin Verberne

The traditional conception of watertight compartmentalization between “domestic” and “international” policy issues is simply no longer realistic. The advent of globalization has fundamentally altered how we perceive of policy-making. as Sidney Tarrow put it, “[i]n today’s world, we can no more draw a sharp line between domestic and international politics than we can understand national politics in the United states apart from its local roots” (Tarrow, 2005: 2). The rise of the international importance of the climate change issue is perhaps the most prominent example of the breakdown of the traditional local versus global policy distinction.

2016 ◽  
pp. 1544-1570
Author(s):  
Catherine Candano

E-government discourse implicates state-produced Websites to enable opportunities and citizen spaces on policy issues, subject to demands to be inclusive, engaging, and free from commercial interests. Policy-making for a global issue like climate change takes place at the inter-governmental United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC). It becomes critical to examine if and how the governments hosting this restrictive global policy-making space may engage citizens through their online presence—host country conference outreach Websites. The chapter explores relational underpinnings between states and citizens in such Websites by examining the values privileged by designers using mixed methods. Among UNCCC Websites from 2007 to 2009, the Danish government Website's enhanced features may have contributed to potential inclusivity for the inter-governmental process online compared to previous government's efforts. However, findings have shown such interactive Website's inherent design aspects may potentially shape the manner that climate conversations are limited in an assumed democratized space online.


Author(s):  
Catherine Candano

E-government discourse implicates state-produced Websites to enable opportunities and citizen spaces on policy issues, subject to demands to be inclusive, engaging, and free from commercial interests. Policy-making for a global issue like climate change takes place at the inter-governmental United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC). It becomes critical to examine if and how the governments hosting this restrictive global policy-making space may engage citizens through their online presence—host country conference outreach Websites. The chapter explores relational underpinnings between states and citizens in such Websites by examining the values privileged by designers using mixed methods. Among UNCCC Websites from 2007 to 2009, the Danish government Website's enhanced features may have contributed to potential inclusivity for the inter-governmental process online compared to previous government's efforts. However, findings have shown such interactive Website's inherent design aspects may potentially shape the manner that climate conversations are limited in an assumed democratized space online.


Author(s):  
Kristina Diprose ◽  
Gill Valentine ◽  
Robert M. Vanderbeck ◽  
Chen Liu ◽  
Katie Mcquaid

This chapter situates the INTERSECTION programme of research within wider international debates regarding the relationship between consumption and climate change. It explores how this relationship is addressed in arguments for environmental justice and sustainable development, and how it is reflected in international policy-making. This discussion highlights how climate change is typically cast as both an international and intergenerational injustice, or the convergence of a ‘global storm’ and an ‘intergenerational storm’. This chapter also situates the original contribution of the book within recent social science scholarship that explores how people live with a changing climate, advocating a ‘human sense’ of climate and social change, and outlines the main themes of the subsequent empirical chapters.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Vanderheiden

The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of triggering reciprocal actions by followers on behalf of that scheme, and argue that such leadership can be coaxed by potential followers through pledges of reciprocal action that are made conditional upon prior action undertaken by a leader. In the context of the current international impasse over post-Kyoto climate change mitigation commitments, I identify means by which leadership by the U.S. or China might be induced by such conditional pledges, potentially allowing some obstacles to international collective action on climate change mitigation to be overcome.


Refuge ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane McAdam

This article provides an account of attempts at the inter- national level to develop a normative framework relating to climate change and migration from late 2010 to mid- 2013. It traces the “catalytic effect” of paragraph 14(f) of the Cancún Adaptation Framework (adopted in December 2010), through to the concerted, but ultimately unsuccessful effort of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2011 to get states to agree to the formulation of a “global guiding framework” on displacement relating to climate change and natural disasters. Finally, the article discusses the creation of the state-led Nansen Initiative in late 2012—a tentative “first step” towards international policy-making in this field—and the outcomes of its first sub-regional consultation in the Pacific in May 2013.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-610
Author(s):  
Anthony F. Pipa ◽  
Max Bouchet

Summary As the 75th anniversary of the United Nations occurs during one of the worst health and economic crises in modern history, multilateralism is weakened by the renewed unilateralism of major powers. International co-operation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic has been limited. This mirrors similar gridlock in collective responses to migration, climate change and humanitarian situations. Meanwhile, cities have been filling gaps in leadership. In responding to the pandemic, cities have been leveraging global co-operation to ensure a successful immediate response and shape the economic recovery. Yet as cities have attempted to insert an urban voice into the traditional multilateral system on global challenges, they have struggled to influence global policy-making. This essay examines how the COVID-19 crisis exposes the implications for the multilateral system of the growing role of cities, and how cities and their networks can adjust their current activities to maximise progress in addressing transnational challenges.


Author(s):  
Sarah Louise Nash

This chapter examines what language is used to label the phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus, and the quirks and discontinuities of this language use. The nodal point of the phenomenon of the migration and climate change nexus is key to the discussions in this book, for without it the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change would not be possible. The construction of the phenomenon in such a way that it has become accepted as existing, valid, and fixed in some way has allowed for the discourse to be reproduced and for policy-making endeavours to be undertaken. However, there is still a great deal of contention surrounding what the phenomenon is, with it meaning different things to different people. The result is that there is no single clear term that is attached to this phenomenon, with a plethora of language sharing the same discursive space. Equally, the different terms carry different nuances of meaning, which are also shifting as the discourse develops, or depending on who employs the term. The chapter analyses three different discursive constructions that are all prominent in international policy making, before turning to four additional concepts that are also occupying the discursive space.


2015 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Farrell

Drawing on large-scale computational data and methods, this research demonstrates how polarization efforts are influenced by a patterned network of political and financial actors. These dynamics, which have been notoriously difficult to quantify, are illustrated here with a computational analysis of climate change politics in the United States. The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993–2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words). Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time. These findings provide new, and comprehensive, confirmation of dynamics long thought to be at the root of climate change politics and discourse. Beyond the specifics of climate change, this paper has important implications for understanding ideological polarization more generally, and the increasing role of private funding in determining why certain polarizing themes are created and amplified. Lastly, the paper suggests that future studies build on the novel approach taken here that integrates large-scale textual analysis with social networks.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-199
Author(s):  
Brendan Boyd

AbstractAlberta is responsible for over a third of Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reducing the country's emissions requires policies and initiatives that reduce emissions in the province. Yet the study of provincial climate change policy in Canada has largely focused on lower-emitting provinces like British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario. This article argues that Alberta is best understood as a “reluctant actor” on climate change, whose policies are influenced by decisions and pressures from outside its borders. The literature on Canadian-American environmental policy making and international policy transfer are used to explore provincial GHG targets and carbon pricing policies. The article finds that Alberta's 2002 targets and Specified Gas Emitters Regulation were determined by economic competitiveness and leakage concerns, while the adoption of new GHG targets in 2008 and a carbon tax was the result of policy transfer through political bandwagoning and the desire for reputational benefits.


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